rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] Alexander Quon on the student commute in the National Post (Reply)

Alexander Quon's National Post article is unsurprising.

For Michael Collens, getting to class at York University isn’t the reason he wakes up early in the morning — it’s walking his young son to daycare.

“[It’s] a short walk from home, at least a short walk for me,” the 40-year-old mature student said.”For a toddler it’s a different matter.”

But for Collens that short walk can come with a cost. If he is delayed, even for a few minutes, a normal day can go from bad to worse. On a good day, a one-way trip to York takes him nearly 45 minutes.

“With things like bad weather or malfunctions on the subway or bad connection for the subway or construction, it is not unusual for a one-way trip to double [to an hour and a half]” he said.

According to StudentMoveTO, a new study jointly produced by the University of Toronto, OCAD, Ryerson and York University that attempted to find the travel habits of Toronto’s university students, a 45 minute one way trip to school is on the high end of the scale.

But it’s not the worst.

The study found that 33 per-cent of the 15,226 students who responded to the survey said they spent two hours or more travelling to and from campus a day.